Medal Counts over Time

I have decided to leave Czechoslovakia, Soviet Russia, East, and West Germany as separate countries during the times they have competed in the Winter Olympics, because I believe that those delegations represent important historical moments.

The first visualization (Top 5 Medal Winning Countries Over 22 Winter Olympics) shows information about how the top winners of the Winter Olympics changed across 90 years. Furthermore, it also combines historic information such as the fall of Soviet Russia (no longer a delegation after the 1988 Olympics) and the unification of East and West Germany.

The chart below (Top 5 Medal Winning Countries across all Winter Olympics) is much simpler but also omits important historical information. It shows shows number of medals won by each country in aggregated form, highlighting the 3 countries that have accumulated the most medals since 1924.

Medal Counts adjusted by Population

I devised a cumulative medal index where a gold medal counts for the most (3 points), bronze the least (1 point), and silver is in the middle (2 points). This line chart is able to show trends not only by the number of medals won by each country but by the value of the medals.

Here the medal index is also adjusted for by GDP per capita

The scatterplot below GDP per capita and the medal index adjusted for country population

Does the Host Country have an Advantage?

## # A tibble: 28 × 3
##    City                             Country        Year
##    <chr>                            <chr>         <int>
##  1 Chamonix                         France         1924
##  2 St. Moritz                       Switzerland    1928
##  3 Lake Placid                      United States  1932
##  4 Garmisch-Partenkirchen           Germany        1936
##  5 SapporoGarmisch-Partenkirchen[d] Japan Germany  1940
##  6 Cortina d'Ampezzo                Italy          1944
##  7 St. Moritz                       Switzerland    1948
##  8 Oslo                             Norway         1952
##  9 Cortina d'Ampezzo                Italy          1956
## 10 Squaw Valley                     United States  1960
## # … with 18 more rows

I utilized a time series to answer whether the host country has an advantage. Each line represents a country and the blue circles indicate the year that country hosted the Winter Olympics. At first glance it does not seem that the host country has an advantage. There are only 3 instances where the host country won the most medals: Lake Placid, 1932; Oslo, 1953; Sochi, 2014.

Most successful athletes

A stacked bar chart represents both the number total medals won but also the number of gold medals won by a single athlete at a glance.

I was interested in seeing whether height plays a role in the number of medals won. The scatterplot shows an weak correlation that is trending in the negative, where the taller an athlete the less medals won. However, this scatterplot only shows the top 100 medal winners and Ole Einar Bjorndalen is definietly an exception in this analysis.

Make it Interactive

I decided to add interactivity to this plot (Medals Won by 12 Winter Olympic Host Countries) because the user can inspect specific information about the countries who were hosts and compare how each country did at each of the Winter Olympics. This gives them more specific information about the specific host countries while hovering, instead of having to repeatedly refer to the legend.

I also added interactivity to the plot below (100 Winter Olympics by Height and Total Medals Won) because users can inspect the specific information about the athletes for themselves. Users are able to simultaneously see the overall trend (or lack there of) between athlete height and total medals won and hover over individual points for more information.

Table of Athletes

This table gives users the ability to search for specific information about the Winter Olympians. It provides a way to clearly see the information about athletes beyond the overall trends that are shown in the graphs above. Furthermore, the additional columns give more information about what type of medal (Bronze, Silver, Gold) the athletes won. Users can also look up their favorite athlete, filter by country or sort by different characteristics. This table has value for both users who are looking for specific information and others who can click through the options available to learn something new.